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"Intel has targeted roughly the level of performance offered by NVIDIA’s GT 650M with their Iris Pro 5200 graphics"

In Anand's review it's obvious Intel fell considerably short of their targets, falling regularly 40-50% behind the GT 650m. And the 650m was just replaced by the 750m, so it will look even worse by comparison.

It's great integrated performance, but if a consumer is still wanting to AAA game regularly on their laptop discrete remains the clear choice.Reply

That integrated GPU isn't worth anywhere NEAR a 200 dollar premium. Intel needs to drop prices by 200 bucks basically across the board. It's getting to the point I don't even care how much faster they are; we're so far past "fast enough" I might just switch everything to AMD on principle. Waiting to see what the market does with all this hardware for any hard decisions; but for the first time ever I may not be buying a laptop with Intel inside.Reply

How many people actually play AAA games on their laptop? Benchmarks for "The Sims" or "World of Warcraft" would be more appropriate. That's the kind of thing normal users actually do. The truth is that "AAA" hardcore games are a tiny and shrinking niche.Reply

They probably don't go over 85W but in the past Apple laptops would lock out the highest CPU clocks if you didn't have the battery in because they were capable of using more power than the adapter could provide.Reply

The simple fact is that Intel is NOT trying to eliminate any reason to have discrete add-on GPUs. That would cost too much die real estate. What they ARE trying to do is to enable laptop OEMs to not need them in all but their high end laptops. They've accomplished that with Haswell by taking a huge chunk out of the performance gap between integrated & discrete GPUs. Even Apple will continue to use these for their lower price & ultrathin Mac BooksReply

I use my work laptop with a core 2 due almost exclusively for CPU. But it has a power hungry nvidia Quattro gpu in there that is really slow. I'm really excited to upgrade to one of these in a smaller form factor instead of my old 6 pound dell. I need it to last just as long (3+ years) so I need the fastest CPU I can buy.

the question is: what is the better CPU performer? The 4900MQ with the higher clocks or the 4950HQ with the huge L4? I'm wondering if the performance is so similar I might as well get the 4950HQ just to have the GPU in case I need it. Next step is finding a thin light laptop with it includedReply

Yup, it's the Core i7-4930MX. Also, I am surprised the Extreme part doesn't have vPro, TXT, and VT-d. Is this a mistake? The 2920XM, 2960XM, and 3940XM all came with vPro and VT-d. I know because I own or have owned laptops will each of them. I am already disappointed to see "K" and "R" desktop parts lacking these features. It will only infuriate me further to see the Core i7-4930MX without them.Reply

Looking at the prices I do wonder what Intel is smoking. 300-1000$ for a cpu? Are they trying to destroy the PC market completely? They don't have any competition from AMD, but they have considerable competition from ARM based tablets.

No wonder people go for these when Intel sells just the CPU/GPU for 2x the price of a good tablet.Reply

If you can do all your work on a tablet, Intel is targeting you with a $50 Celeron or Atom, not a $300 i7. A Celeron with a small SSD/hybrid drive and a clean install of Windows/Linux/Chrome OS is extremely snappy for typical tablet tasks.

Of course, all the OEMs are stupid and sell i5 + HDD + bloatware instead, which for most use cases is slower.Reply

Keep in mind that at least for now, there are a ton of businesses that are still sticking with PCs and Laptops. Plus, while for some things an iPad or tablet will be "fast enough", try doing complex spreadsheet work or document editing on one. There are use cases where the fact that the quad-core Haswell chips are an order of magnitude faster than a tablet is still important. Paying three times as much as the cost of a basic tablet to get performance that's over 10X as high is not necessarily a bad investment, at least if your primary concern isn't mobility and battery life.Reply

If excel / libreoffice spreadsheet not supporting multi threading, what benefit when you bought something like these compared to core i3? The real world performance to process the spreadsheet is not that significant.

For business I think i3 or AMD trinity is good enough. With notebook price about ~ 1/2 compared to this.Reply

I'm many cases price of your most important tool doesn't really matter that much. Even the most expensive laptop you can think of usually costs around 3000USD/EUR unless you really go for some industrial strenght military spacetech.

And when you are equipping your 100 000+ usd/eur per year salaried engineers with tools, that is really a drop in a bucket.Reply

Exactly. The software licenses on my laptop at work run over $15,000 a year. I don't think they are too worried about the extra 500 dollars it cost them to get a better processor over an i3. My salary + travel + software for 4 years (replacement lifetime) makes the entire cost of the laptop about 0.5% or less of the cost of employing me over that time.

And i'm not even a software engineer. I work in heavy industry. The upfront costs for hardware for the business are really just not that substantial when looking at the overall costs of everything else related to employing someone like me. And I'm certainly no one special for my company. Reply

Well that argument can be applied to all cost. From toilet paper to cpu.But running a profitable business means you have to control cost all over.The reason beeing that revenue is defined by marginal cost; the last product you sell the last toiletpaper you use so to speak. It does matter.Having an agressive attitude to control cost all over your company can define a business. Think IKEA.Reply

the point he is making is that since it is relatively cheap compared to everything else they do, an extra 1% to their budget absolutely increases his productivity by more than 1%. This is harder to justify at say a small mom-and-pop store where they would be NO more productive at 3x the cost of an i3. Cost is relative.Reply

I think your wrong about that comment. The company Sager that produces my laptop, is very upgradeable and they come standard with the 4700MQ, but for an additional $185 you can have it replaced at the vendor level, not manufacturer level, with a 4800MQ, for $385 you can have it replaced with a 4900MQ. And for like $800 you can even get the Xtreme part. So that means they have to be sockets. In fact if you clearly read this article it says at the begging that MQ Part are PGA(Socketed) and H parts 4950HQ and the like 4700HQ are BGA(Soldered on chips) So yes M series are socketed and H are BGA.Reply